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Opinion Contributor

Letter to the editor

Rep. Darrell Issa’s opinion piece “Health Care Law Will Deepen Deficit” (POLITICO, Aug. 22) reminded me of the late great Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous riposte: “You are entitled to your own opinions. You are not entitled to your own facts.”

Despite Issa’s claims, the Congressional Budget Office projects that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will reduce the deficit by $132 billion between 2010 and 2019.

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The CBO has stated repeatedly that its deficit-reduction projections are largely due to the ACA’s reform of Medicare. Unlike in the past two decades, when Medicare spending averaged scorching annual growth rates between 8 percent and 9 percent, the ACA will slow growth to more sustainable levels.

It does so by making modest changes to provider reimbursements and introducing efficient preventive care practices. The most significant change equalizes payments to Medicare Advantage plans, a change that saves more than $135 billion over the next decade.

These changes are working. Both CMS and Standard & Poor’s have reported declines in Medicare’s growth since the health care act became law. The CBO’s new projections suggest this decline in Medicare spending is larger than originally thought.

Between August 2010 and March 2011, the CBO lowered Medicare’s projected annual growth rate from 5.8 percent to 5.4 percent. Given that Medicare will cost more than $7.4 trillion over the next decade, even a 0.4 percent reduction means $29.6 billion in savings.

Issa’s claim that employers will drop employee health coverage to game new federal insurance credits is also misleading — and runs contrary to existing data. While the McKinsey survey predicts a significant departure of employer-sponsored coverage, other nonpartisan analyses disagree. Only 6 percent of firms with 500 or more employees and 3 percent of firms with more than 10,000 employees would likely terminate their health coverage, a Mercer survey found.

Another study by the Urban Institute determined that the law would have an even smaller effect on employer-sponsored coverage — a conclusion also reached by the CBO and demonstrated in Massachusetts after similar reforms.

Issa and I agree that Congress should reduce wasteful spending and regain our prime credit rating. Unfortunately for his argument, the CBO projected that legislation to repeal the ACA would actually increase the deficit by $119 billion.

Instead of repealing the law, perhaps we can learn from the countries that still have AAA credit ratings — all of which benefit from reforms akin to the Affordable Care Act.

Readers' Comments (8)

Health care reform is needed but no one can agree on how to go about it. what is needed is a comprehensive look at the industry to see why the costs are spiralling out of control which means that you need to address each issue independantly but the plan put into place by obama is a start regardless of whether it is as viable as it is made out to be or not.

In general population not everyone goes along with preventative care, partly due to real or perceived costs associated with the care that make people think that they cannot afford the care and partly due to the fact that you have people who do not believe that they need preventative care of that it has no benefit. Changing the mantality of those groups of people has to happen for the preventative care aspect to be an effective way of cost reduction.

Part of the problem with the costs associated with health care is the administrative costs on the doctors end due to the amount of paperwork that the doctors have to deal with which causes them to hire people specifically to deal with ensuring that every "I" is dotted and every "t" is crossed due to how picky the health insurance industry is especially medicare when looking processing the paperwork.

What also adds to health care costs is the promotional items that the health insurance companies tend to give out. Going by what I seen with having worked in a warehouse were we warehoused both the needed forms and promotional items for a large health insurance company, some of the promotional items had their logo on them along with being expensive at least in small quantities and they had hundreds of those items on hand at all times for various events.

In some circumstances, you have the doctor or the patient looking for the expensive test to be done before knowing if the test is warranted.

WIth regards to medicare and medicaid, I do not agree with the mentality of the Republicans that would prefer those on a limited income like social security to absorb costs that the Republicans want to pass onto them that force people to choose between their health, food on the table or a place to live. I also don't agree with the republican idea of giving out vouchers to buy private health insurance since most people who are on medicare and medicaid have paid into the system and there being no guarantee that the private health insurers will honor the vouchers, want more than what the vouchers are for or exclude care due to pre-existing conditions.

I'm sorry congressman, but when did the congress impose the fee reduction for doctors that was part of the "savings" Obamacare was going to generate. Without that $300 billion cut, the numbers go negative even with the other tricks the congress used to gin the numbers like costing out Obamacare with 10 years of revenue, but only 6 years of benefits. If you would shift just one year (7 years of benefits) you would decrease savings by $400 billion.

I'm sorry congressman, but when did the congress impose the fee reduction for doctors that was part of the "savings" Obamacare was going to generate. Without that $300 billion cut, the numbers go negative even with the other tricks the congress used to gin the numbers like costing out Obamacare with 10 years of revenue, but only 6 years of benefits. If you would shift just one year (7 years of benefits) you would decrease savings by $400 billion.

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